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Aggregate statistics across 846 documented custody incidents where legitimate owners, heirs, or authorised parties encountered barriers accessing Bitcoin.

From: Bitcoin Custody Incident Archive Statistics | CustodyStress.

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In the dystopian nightmare scenario imagined by opponents of facial recognition technology, an innocent person sitting at home might find themselves erroneously flagged by facial matching, and instantly turned into a criminal in the eyes of the law. Probable cause standards and police procedural policies are supposed to prevent this kind of error, but this is exactly what appears to have happened to Angela Lipps.
Lipps, a 50-year-old grandmother, has never visited states that are not adjacent to her home in Tennessee. Regardless, Lipps was forced to spend six months in prison, after U.S. Marshals showed up at her house with guns, claiming she was the mastermind of an organized bank fraud operation – in Fargo, North Dakota.
“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know anyone from North Dakota,” says Lipps in an article from Inforum.
Facial recognition technology flagged Lipps based on a surveillance video of a woman using a fake military ID to withdraw large sums of money. The officer in charge of the case appears to have approved an arrest based solely on the facial match and basic comparisons with Lipps’ social media accounts and driver’s license photo.
The case mirrors other cases of police treating facial recognition results as probable cause, despite established law and policy providing no basis for doing so with technology that has been judged comparable to an anonymous informant. Fargo Police signed an affidavit of probable cause based on the biometric match, follow-up coverage from Inforum says.

From: US woman jailed 5 months after facial recognition mismatch, lax police work | Biometric Update.

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Under the law, food stores and other retail establishments cannot require consumers to pay by credit card or use another cashless transaction method to complete their purchase. They also cannot charge consumers a higher price if they pay in cash.

Stores that violate the new law will face maximum civil penalties of $1,000 for the first violation and $1,500 for each succeeding one.

The law passed both houses of the New York State Legislature last year before securing the signature of Governor Kathy Hochul, bringing the state in line with New York City, which has had similar rules in place since 2020.

From: New York state force stores to accept cash.

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AI agents favor suppliers with structured, machine-readable offers. Intermediaries have moved fastest, building agent-ready data and transaction layers. However, most airlines still operate digital stacks optimized for humans—leaving their offers only partially visible to AI agents and pushing high-intent demand into fragile scraping or manual servicing paths.

The implication is straightforward: To compete in an AI-agent-mediated world, airlines must start optimizing infrastructure rather than interfaces.

Airlines should urgently focus on five priorities:

Optimize data for machines, not humans.
Structured content, stable application programming interfaces, and consistent identifiers matter more than visual user experience. If agents cannot reliably parse and compare offers, they will route demand elsewhere.
Control the transaction layer.
Decide which elements of pricing, payment, and servicing should remain proprietary vs. exposed to avoid being reduced to a commoditized fulfillment pipe.
Make agents care where booking happens.
Differentiated inventory, bundles, or benefits must appeal to AI agents—not just humans—to justify a channel preference.
Design for trust, not just access.
Agents reward transparency, consistency, and fulfillment reliability. Progressive autonomy requires clear rules and predictable outcomes.

From: Is the Airline Industry Ready for Agent-Led Bookings? | Bain & Company.

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Moreover, LLMs frequently directed users to an OTA rather than an FSC website—even when an FSC was a “first choice” option.

The implication is clear: LLMs gravitate toward the source with the easiest downstream interaction, and OTAs currently produce cleaner, more structured, and more agent-readable data.

From: Is the Airline Industry Ready for Agent-Led Bookings? | Bain & Company.

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LLMs were able to complete bookings reliably using OTAs but not airline websites

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Sweden also needs to step up its work on cheap, efficient and secure payments between currencies, says the Riksbank: “Efficient mobile payments across countries and currencies can also be achieved by linking local solutions, such as Swish in Sweden, with similar solutions in other countries. The Riksbank considers that this solution would benefit Swedish consumers and companies and therefore encourages Getswish and its owners to work towards linking Swish.”

From: Swedish central bank threatens banks with action over instant payments.

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Coinbase is betting on AI payments as its core crypto brokerage business struggles with a broad market downturn. It is also developing AI agents that can be used for executing crypto trades, as well as a marketplace and wallets for AI agents.

From: Coinbase Dives Into AI Agent Payments — The Information.

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Beyond individual safety and convenience, the integration of fast payments and digital identity also helps create jobs and improve people’s lives. By reducing payment frictions, fraud risk, and onboarding barriers, these systems help small firms operate formally, get paid reliably, and scale their activities, while enabling workers and microentrepreneurs to participate more fully in the digital economy.

From: Fast payments and digital ID: Making everyday payments safer, simpler, and more efficient.

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At the start of this year, a video popped up on social media sites in India showing the chief executive of the Bombay Stock Exchange, Sundararaman Ramamurthy, giving investors advice on which stocks to buy.
Viewers were promised handsome returns if they heeded his advice.
The only problem was, it was not Ramamurthy speaking. It was a deepfake video of him, made using artificial intelligence.

From: Deepfake attack: ‘Many people could have been cheated’ – BBC News.

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The level of uncertainty about AI’s economic effects is so high—and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information about its economic effects so paltry—that even serious conversations about AI from otherwise analytical people often veer toward the genre of fiction rather than the category of empirical analysis. AI land is so full of science fiction precisely because the space is so bereft of official high-quality data.

From: Nobody Knows Anything – Derek Thompson.

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